The Great Divide

Clinton, Sanders, and the future of the Democratic Party.

Though Sanders remains likely to lose, his ideology may prevail in the long run.

Illustration by Barry Blitt

On February 8th, the day before the New Hampshire primary, Bill Clinton stepped onstage to introduce his wife at a rally in Manchester. “I have to be careful what I say,” he told the crowd, acknowledging his tendency, over the years, to eclipse her with a loose remark that sends the news cycle churning. The former President seems diminished since Hillary Clinton’s last race, in 2008—he is thinner, more soft-spoken, less energetic. And yet Clintonism—the ideology, the tactics, and the record of his eight years in the White House—still looms large in the Democratic primaries. The subtext, and often the center, of Bernie Sanders’s campaign to upset Hillary Clinton is that too many of the signature achievements of her husband’s Presidency were a series of betrayals—the deregulation of Wall Street, an obsession with deficit reduction, the Defense of Marriage Act, his crime bill, the North American Free Trade Agreement—and that she was an enthusiastic partner in passing that agenda. At times during the Democratic primary campaign, the nineteen-nineties have been so central to the debate that one expects to hear Weezer or Rage Against the Machine playing softly in the background.

Despite Sanders’s surprising victory last Tuesday in Michigan, where polls showed him trailing by an average of some twenty points, his odds of winning the nomination are slight. But his candidacy has exposed deep tensions within the Democratic Party. Long before Barack Obama attacked Hillary, during the 2008 campaign, for her “triangulating and poll-driven positions,” Sanders, who was elected to the House in 1990 and to the Senate in 2006, has been making the case against Clintonism. In the nineteen-nineties, he was a gadfly leftist in a party that was trying to seize the political center after twelve years of Reaganism. As Sanders noted in the debate in Flint, on March 6th, when Hillary was First Lady she publicly supported NAFTA, while he “was on a picket line” protesting it. Today, both candidates oppose the agreement—and many other aspects of Bill Clinton’s record.

Clinton’s 1992 campaign and his Administration reflected two political strains that still define the Party: one is populist, anti-Wall Street, and pro-regulation; the other is more austere, more oriented toward the New York financial world, and more laissez-faire. Clinton’s Labor Secretary, Robert B. Reich, pressed for more government spending, but the top economic adviser in the White House, Robert Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs executive and later the Treasury Secretary, ultimately persuaded Clinton to abandon many of the liberal spending priorities that he championed during his campaign and to focus instead on reducing the deficit. Later, Rubin also pushed to deregulate the financial industry. That polarity remains. Hillary Clinton is surrounded by Rubin’s acolytes; Reich, an old friend of Bill Clinton’s from their days together at Oxford as Rhodes Scholars, recently endorsed Sanders.

During Obama’s years in office, Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, stood for the populist left, and Timothy Geithner, Obama’s first Treasury Secretary and the former chairman of the New York Federal Reserve, replaced Rubin as the ally of Wall Street. Although Obama enjoyed two years of major liberal victories, including the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial-reform act, such achievements ended after the Republican takeover of Congress in 2011.

As a long stalemate began in Washington, the activist left began to support movements such as Occupy Wall Street, which began in 2011, as a response to economic inequality, and Black Lives Matter, which arose in 2013 and addresses criminal-justice reform and institutional racism. Both movements are sharply critical of the Clinton era. Occupy points to Clinton’s deregulation of the financial industry, and Black Lives Matter has highlighted the fact that Clinton’s crime bill, which introduced the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule, sparked a rise, in the past two decades, in imprisonment, particularly of young African-American men. Last year, Bill Clinton told the N.A.A.C.P., “I signed a bill that made the problem worse. And I want to admit it.”

Neither movement is a great deal more sanguine about the Obama years. By the time Sanders made his decision to run, last April, there was a restless base ready to support a candidate who broke with the perceived centrism of both the Clinton and the Obama Administrations. While the Republican Party establishment has been blindsided by the populism behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, a similar sentiment has existed on the Democratic side. Hillary’s campaign was slow to grasp the scale of that movement and to acknowledge the momentum of the Sanders campaign. “We have two ‘change’ electorates,” Neera Tanden, a longtime adviser to Hillary and the president and C.E.O. of the Center for American Progress, told me. “One is just smaller than the other. The problem on the Democratic side is that the strong support for Barack Obama hid it from everybody.”

Sanders “is tapping into something that is very deep and very profound inside the Democratic Party, which is this discontent with the system that is no longer producing for everyday people,” Simon Rosenberg, a Hillary supporter and the head of NDN (formerly the New Democrat Network), a liberal think tank in Washington, told me. “He has characterized Hillary as a champion of that system and as somebody who is actually a leader of the system, while he is the one that wants to change it.” Rosenberg added, “He’s not being perceived as a leftist. He is being perceived as somebody who is deeply in touch with a sense that something has gone wrong and that the system isn’t working.”

In Manchester, Bill Clinton tried to make sense of the uprising. “I understand people who get madder every day when they keep reading we’re the best-performing economy in the world,” he said. “We’ve grown fourteen million jobs in five years and yet eighty-four per cent of the people haven’t had an increase in their income since the crash.” Wages have been stagnant for so long, he said, that it was a wonder that it had taken this many years for the electorate to erupt. In New Hampshire, Sanders received sixty per cent of the vote and Clinton thirty-eight per cent—one of the worst electoral defeats that either Clinton had ever suffered.

Lately, Hillary has sounded less like a Clinton Democrat and more like a Sanders Democrat. Since the campaign began, she has modernized her positions on trade, the economy, and criminal-justice reform. (She came out in support of same-sex marriage only in 2013.) A few days before the primary in Michigan, where her husband’s free-trade agenda is highly unpopular, Clinton gave a major economic speech, in which she asked, “How do we raise incomes and create the good jobs of the future?” She then said, “I don’t think we can answer that question by refighting battles from twenty years ago.” She blamed some problems in the economy on “Wall Street and some of our corporations,” and noted that the purpose of banks “is not to create huge riches for a select few at the expense of everyone else.”

Sanders doesn’t buy the transformation. “It doesn’t matter what her policies are,” he told me last Tuesday, as he waited for the primary results from Michigan and Mississippi to come in. “What matters is whether or not, if she is elected President—and we’re in this to win—if she’s going to stand up and fight. And I think there are many people who will tell you, look, that will not be the case. Look, anybody can give any speech they want tomorrow—somebody writes you a great speech—but the day after you’re elected you say, ‘Well, you know, I talked to my Republican colleagues and they think this is not acceptable.’ ”

He added, “The question is not what she says. The question is what her record has been and what she will do if she is elected President.”

Sanders’s current slogan is “A Future to Believe In.” At seventy-four, with campaign ads featuring Simon and Garfunkel’s music, he seems an unlikely standard-bearer for the Democratic Party of tomorrow. But the next generation of voters clearly favors him, or at least what he stands for. Through March 8th, Sanders won voters between seventeen and twenty-nine years old in thirteen of the fifteen states for which there were entrance or exit polls. In that age range, he beat Clinton by an average of sixty-seven per cent to thirty-two per cent. His biggest victory among this group, in his home state of Vermont, was ninety-five per cent to five per cent. Millennials supported Sanders even in Arkansas, where Clinton was First Lady.

“She’s crooked,” Marilyn DeLuca, a Sanders supporter from Londonderry, New Hampshire, said on February 9th, the night of Sanders’s victory there. “She lies. She’s too connected with Wall Street. She thinks about herself and not her constituents. She’s changed her tone or she’s changed her mind on things too many times.” DeLuca’s is a widespread sentiment.

Sanders has long embraced the socialist label, and it seems not to hurt him among younger voters. Ben Tulchin, Sanders’s pollster, told me that millennials support Sanders “because their generation is so fucked, for lack of a better word, unless they see dramatic change. What’s their experience been with capitalism? They have had two recessions, one really bad one. They have a mountain of student-loan debt. They’ve got really high health-care costs, and their job prospects are mediocre at best. So that’s capitalism for you.”

Tulchin, who is forty-two, joined the Sanders campaign for the same reason that many disaffected Democratic voters joined: the candidate’s populist message, which he wasn’t hearing from the President. “Obama is the guy who hangs out on the North Side of Chicago with wealthy people and he raises money from them,” Tulchin said. “Not to denigrate him, but, I mean, if you’re from the kind of moderate business wing of the Party—which he isn’t exclusively, but he is partly—you don’t speak that language.”

In 1993, Tulchin worked as an intern for Stanley Greenberg, one of Bill Clinton’s earliest advisers, delivering Greenberg’s polls to the White House. Greenberg was initially aligned with Reich and the populists but was pushed out of the Administration in 1995, after Congress fell to the Republicans. Tulchin eventually moved to California, and worked for the polling firm hired by Howard Dean during the 2004 campaign, before starting his own firm, in 2009.

After the 2010 midterm debacle, Obama tried to persuade Republicans to support a budget deal by offering concessions on funding for Social Security and Medicare. In California, which faced a budget crisis, the new governor, Jerry Brown, seemed to be moving in the same direction. “They were blaming public employees and their pensions for the budget deficit,” Tulchin said. “But who crashed the economy? Wall Street. So if you start talking about taxing the wealthy, making them pay their fair share, you change the entire political narrative.”

Obama occasionally moved left. In December of 2011, in a speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, after the President had given up on the budget deal and was starting to focus on his reëlection message, he talked about income inequality, referring to the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Era agenda, known as the New Nationalism. “Roosevelt was called a radical,” Obama said. “He was called a socialist, even a communist.” Obama attacked the “big banks” and the “billionaires” who “have a tax rate as low as one per cent.” In his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, he continued to strike those populist notes.

But it was never a good fit. Felicia Wong, the president and C.E.O. of the Roosevelt Institute, a leading progressive think tank, noted that several of Obama’s economic advisers—including Jason Furman, now the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget—have shifted to concentrate more on issues of inequality. “Obama was in some ways a traditionalist about some of this stuff,” Wong said. “But just look at how much that frame has changed on the Democratic side.”

Populists began to focus on Elizabeth Warren, an academic with expertise in bankruptcy law, whose ideas about reforming Wall Street earned the admiration of the White House and the enmity of Republicans. After the G.O.P. blocked her bid to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Obama’s first Administration, she launched her Senate campaign, which was built around the issues of inequality and reining in the financial-services industry. In 2015, liberal groups tried to draft her into running for President against Clinton. She declined, but continued to press her agenda. Last year, she called on the Democratic Presidential candidates to support a bill that would make it illegal for Wall Street firms to award golden parachutes to employees who leave to work for the federal government. Sanders expressed support for the legislation almost immediately; Hillary Clinton hesitated for weeks. The bill could affect any Clinton advisers who now work on Wall Street if they were to join a future Clinton Administration; Warren had in mind precisely this scenario. In late August, she met privately with Vice-President Joe Biden, as he considered entering the race. Reports of the meeting set off speculation about whether Warren might ultimately become Biden’s running mate. Days later, Clinton wrote an op-ed endorsing Warren’s bill.

When Warren decided not to run for President, the Sanders campaign became the populists’ rallying point. As the campaign has progressed, Sanders’s pitch has been aimed more explicitly at young voters. At many of his rallies, he pauses during his speech and asks attendees about their level of student debt. Like an auctioneer, he gestures around the room and echoes the numbers that his supporters call out, declaring as the winner the person with the most debt. The millennials who turned out for Sanders in Iowa were almost enough for him to tie Clinton there. In New Hampshire, which allows independents to vote, the victory was overwhelming.

As the race continues and the delegate count goes in Clinton’s favor, however, Sanders has sounded increasingly frustrated that she has co-opted some of his message. She has also been aided by Sanders’s obvious shortcomings as a candidate—particularly his modest support among African-Americans and Latinos—and by his limitations as a legislator. After twenty-five years in Congress, Sanders does not have a long record of notable achievements. Former Representative Barney Frank, a Massachusetts liberal who worked with Sanders in the House, said, “Virtually every group I am familiar with that has been seriously engaged in trying to bring about change to the left on any important issue—including health care, including financial reform, including women’s rights and L.G.B.T. rights—is either neutral or with Hillary. Simply stating a pure position doesn’t advance your cause very much.”

In the late afternoon of February 26th, the day before the South Carolina primary, Clinton spoke in Orangeburg, where she was introduced by James Clyburn, a seventy-five-year-old U.S. representative and the highest-ranking African-American in Congress. More than half the Democratic electorate in South Carolina is African-American, and Clyburn, like much of the state’s Democratic establishment, had endorsed Clinton. Wearing a colorful sweater with golfers on it, he addressed a predominantly black group of Clinton supporters who held signs that said, “Fighting for us,” and he reminded them that when Clinton graduated from law school she worked in South Carolina for the Children’s Defense Fund.

“She came here on a mission to help young boys who were incarcerated but forced to serve their sentences with adults,” Clyburn said, his voice hoarse. “She came here to reform that system.” He went through her long biography and a list of achievements. “Nobody in the history of this nation has ever run for the Presidency with the résumé that this lady has,” Clyburn said.

In Bill Clinton’s second term, when he was investigated and impeached, he found some of his strongest defenders among African-Americans. Sanders nonetheless had reason to believe that Hillary’s support in South Carolina might be thin. In 1992, as a candidate, Bill Clinton went out of his way to prove that he was not beholden to black politicians and interest groups. That January, he returned to Arkansas from the campaign trail to oversee, as governor, the execution of a mentally disabled African-American man. A few months later, in front of a largely black audience at an event organized by Jesse Jackson’s National Rainbow Coalition, he assailed Sister Souljah, a black rapper who, during riots in Los Angeles, suggested that blacks should kill whites.

Clinton’s social policies were also problematic. In addition to his crime bill, he signed into law a welfare-reform bill, in 1996, which passed with mostly Republican support and helped clinch his reëlection that year. Ninety per cent of Democrats in the House and the Senate, including Sanders, opposed the bill, and prominent members of Clinton’s Administration resigned in protest over it.

Sanders has tried to turn all of this against Hillary. “During that time, I spoke out against so-called welfare reform, because I thought it was scapegoating people who were helpless, people who were very, very vulnerable,” he said in late February, at a press conference in South Carolina. “Secretary Clinton at that time had a very different position on welfare reform, strongly supported it, and worked hard to round up votes for its passage.”

A couple of days later, Sanders spoke at a get-out-the-vote rally in Columbia that attracted a large contingent of students, most of them white, from the University of South Carolina. He was introduced by Michael Render, the hip-hop artist known as Killer Mike. (Sanders has gained support from several high-profile African-Americans, including Spike Lee, Harry Belafonte, and Cornel West, but they tend to be entertainers and academics, not politicians.) Render, who is heavyset, and wore a black Polo hoodie, had spent the week pleading with South Carolinians to give Sanders a chance. He thought that Sanders might have broken through to some of the state’s African-American electorate, which the Clinton campaign had characterized as a firewall against Sanders’s resounding win in New Hampshire. “I know from going around and shaking hands and hugging these beautiful black faces in South Carolina that goddam firewall’s got a crack in it,” Render told the crowd.

Render urged the few African-Americans in the room to rebel against Clyburn and the state’s black establishment. “I know it’s hard when your family members are telling you to vote for Hillary,” he said. “I know it’s very difficult when they tell you they’ve been Democrats for fifty and sixty years.” Render worked himself up into a shout. “I’m telling African-Americans today: if your mother tells you you’re wrong for casting that vote for Bernie Sanders, walk past her, walk to the polls! I’m here to tell African-Americans today: if your preacher stands in the pulpit and tells you to vote for anybody besides Bernie Sanders, I want you to ask him, ‘What would Jesus really do?’ ”

Clinton won South Carolina by almost forty-eight points; she won the African-American vote by eighty-six per cent to Sanders’s fourteen per cent. Her margin among blacks was even better than Obama’s margin in 2008. The only demographic groups that Sanders won were seventeen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds and white men, both of which made up a small percentage of the electorate.

Any populist Democrat who follows Sanders in a bid for President will have to win over nonwhite voters no matter their age. In 2008, African-Americans represented fifty-five per cent of South Carolina’s primary electorate; in 2016 that figure was sixty-one per cent. And the nonwhite percentage will only continue to grow. Sanders is running a left-wing campaign at a moment when the black activist left is experiencing a renaissance, and polls show that young blacks, like young whites, are more likely to support Sanders’s message of economic populism and political reform.

But that appeal has its limits. “The black left is mostly non-electoral and sometimes even anti-electoral,” Van Jones, a former adviser to President Obama and a longtime African-American organizer, told me. “It’s very strong on principles and very weak on precincts. So what you see is a lot of protests and a lot of critique, but they don’t know how to turn out voters. You can have two hundred Spike Lees versus one James Clyburn and still lose.” Render said of his friends, “Their mantra is ‘Don’t be a part of the political process at all. You’re leading our people into a burning house.’ ”

Activists tend to make their way into electoral politics over time. Opponents of the Vietnam War in the nineteen-sixties bolstered George McGovern’s Presidential campaign in 1972. McGovern lost in a landslide, but a number of his young campaign aides, including Gary Hart and Bill and Hillary Clinton, became the next generation of Democratic leaders. DeRay Mckesson, one of the most prominent activists from Black Lives Matter, is now running for mayor of Baltimore. In 2010 and 2014, the Democrats suffered major losses in Congress and at the state level, including many of the Party’s more moderate and centrist members. With Sanders winning young voters overwhelmingly, his campaign may eventually be seen as an incubator for the Party’s future politicians.

To prevail in the coming general election, the Democratic nominee will most likely need to meet or exceed the level of support that Obama had among nonwhites. When I asked Sanders about his lack of appeal to African-Americans, he pointed to his relative strength among younger nonwhite voters. “It’s not so much a racial divide but a generational divide,” he told me. He said that “we may have won” the Latino vote in Nevada and Colorado. (The data are unclear.) “I think we’re doing very well with younger people in the African-American community—whether it’s fifty per cent or more, I don’t know.”

He asked, “Why are we doing so poorly with elderly people, whether they’re black, Latino, or white?” His explanation wasn’t complicated: “One of the theories is Hillary Clinton was First Lady of Arkansas for twelve years; her husband, Bill, is very, very popular in the African-American community; and there’s an identification of the black community with the Clintons.”

A few hours after we talked, Sanders’s fortunes changed. In one of the greatest primary upsets in modern history, Sanders defeated Clinton in Michigan. For the first time in his campaign, he also cracked Clinton’s support among nonwhites, winning twenty-eight per cent of the African-American vote. Sanders has a large campaign war chest—he raised more than a hundred and thirty-five million dollars from more than 1.5 million individuals—and he is likely to score more victories. By staying in the race to the end, he will continue to force Hillary to respond to the anger and the frustrations in the electorate. He will serve as a useful test if she runs against Trump, who might appeal to many white Democrats who are struggling economically. Sanders’s ongoing presence in the race will also give Clinton little time to relax. She likely won’t secure the required two thousand and twenty-six delegates until early June. Delegates are awarded proportionally in the Democratic primaries, so Sanders, who hits forty per cent in most national polls when pitted against Clinton, can win many delegates even while losing states. He lost Massachusetts by less than two points, and received forty-five delegates to Clinton’s forty-six. Clinton will be left in candidate purgatory: confident that she will be the nominee but still regularly losing to Sanders, who could arrive at the Convention, in late July, with a large bloc of the total delegates.

In past primaries, when the Democratic race narrowed to two candidates, the expected loser was often forced to quit because his campaign ran out of funds. Sanders does not have that problem. “The small donors can keep fuelling his campaign,” Joe Trippi, who ran Dean’s campaign, said. “Now you either have a super PAC or a small-donor base, and if you have one of those things you can keep going. So is he going all the way to the Convention? Yeah, if he wants to.”

There are two reasons for Sanders to soldier on. One is to exact concessions, as Warren was able to do on legislation restricting Wall Street employees. Sanders’s presence has required Clinton to adopt more populist economic policies, and the influence could go further. “She’s basically a conservative person, except on issues of gender and inclusiveness,” Gary Hart, who, with his insurgent primary campaign in 1984, almost beat former Vice-President Walter Mondale, told me. “Her natural instinct is not to play the economic-class card, and that is Sanders’s whole campaign. He has forced her to be tougher on big money than her natural inclination.”

Most notably, Clinton abandoned her support for the free-trade initiative known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she negotiated as Secretary of State and once described as the “gold standard” of trade agreements. The longer Sanders pressures Clinton on the issue, the more difficult it will be for her to flip back again. “Bill Clinton went from being semi-trade to being pro-trade,” Barney Frank said. “He could not have easily slipped back to being anti-trade. Hillary Clinton went from being somewhat pro-trade to being somewhat anti-trade. You can’t go back. You can change once; you can’t change twice.”

If Sanders arrives at the Convention with a sufficient number of primary victories and between a third and half of the delegates, he will also be able to influence the Party’s platform. His advisers told me that Sanders will fight for more anti-free-trade measures, a commitment to campaign-finance reform, and breaking up big banks.

“He will come out of this with a prominent voice, with a committed e-mail list of people united around his issues,” Anita Dunn, who worked for Bill Bradley’s unsuccessful campaign against Al Gore, in 2000, and was one of Obama’s top strategists during the 2008 race and later in the White House, said. “That is the beginning of a potential movement, if he chooses to build on it. It’s not as though these issues are going to go away. Fundamental inequality and the inequities in the political process are not suddenly going to be fixed by anyone.”

When I spoke to Sanders last week, he refused to speculate about any Convention scenarios that didn’t include him as the nominee. “I look forward to her dropping out and giving me her strong support,” he said. He was adamant that Clinton could not deliver the kind of change that voters are demanding, no matter what policy positions she adopted. “The issue is creating an economy and a political system that works for all Americans and not the one per cent,” he said. “That does not happen through a speech. That happens by reaching out and mobilizing millions and millions of people. There is no indication that Hillary Clinton has ever done that, or ever wants to do that. You don’t go and give speeches behind closed doors to Wall Street and be the same person that is going to rally the American people. That just does not exist.”

The other reason for Sanders to stay in the contest is one that most Democrats, even Sanders, are reluctant to discuss. Polls show that Clinton’s greatest vulnerability has to do with trustworthiness and character. She is navigating three federal investigations resulting from her handling of classified data while she was Secretary of State. However these turn out, it is unusual for a presumptive nominee and some of her current and former aides to be under investigation by the F.B.I. Lost amid all the electoral news of Super Tuesday was a cryptic statement made by James Comey, the head of the F.B.I., during testimony before Congress: “I am very close, personally, to that investigation to insure that we have the resources we need, including people and technology.” The following day, the Times reported that a former Clinton aide, Bryan Pagliano, who set up her e-mail server and had pleaded the Fifth Amendment when he was asked to testify before Congress, had agreed to an immunity deal with the F.B.I. Moreover, the Times noted that the Bureau was likely to interview Clinton as part of its investigation.

At a Democratic debate last October, Sanders declared the scandal a non-issue. He said, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.” Some of his strategists have been trying to get him to change his mind, but they say that his wife, Jane, has opposed attacking Clinton too harshly. Tulchin told me, “We’re constrained by a candidate and his spouse who don’t want to say anything negative about her, don’t want to name her.”

Democrats outside the campaign remain surprised by Sanders’s decision not to raise the e-mail issue more directly and alarmed that more Democrats are not talking about the potential fallout from the investigations. “The person that the White House cleared the field for, and that everyone has fallen in line for, has three federal investigations going on,” a prominent Democratic consultant told me. “The guy who set up the system for her took the Fifth. You’re not supposed to read anything into that, but please. It’s the elephant in the room, and Sanders took it off the table. Trump will have no problem going after this stuff.”

Last week, I asked Sanders if he had made a mistake in not pressing the issue. “I understand that the political commentators stay up nights hoping and praying that I could become a Donald Trump, because they love Donald Trump,” he said, referring to Trump’s dark warning that Clinton will be indicted and unable to continue her campaign. He went on to complain about how the media covers every outrageous statement made by Trump yet ignores his own policy speeches. He acknowledged the seriousness of the investigations but said, “We have a legal process by which it is occurring and it will take place.”

Sanders has become increasingly aggressive in attacking Clinton’s relationship with the financial world. At a debate in Miami last week, on the day after his Michigan victory, he pilloried Clinton for delivering a speech to an audience at Goldman Sachs for two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. “I would think that a speech so great that you got paid so much money for, you would like to share it with the American people,” he said. “So I think she should release the transcript.” Meanwhile, Sanders’s aides have started to talk more openly, and delicately, about some of Clinton’s vulnerabilities. “Trust and honesty,” Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, told reporters on the morning after Super Tuesday. “Rightly or wrongly, the Secretary, when you poll independents, has some real problems with independents. They just don’t have confidence that what they’re hearing is what they’re going to get. And to overcome that hurdle in a general-election environment when you’re being pounded by Donald Trump day after day after day—I’m not sure that that can be done.”

But Sanders seems far more interested in affecting policy than in taking advantage of Clinton’s scandals. It might be the right decision in the long run; it’s not clear that attacking Clinton helps him win over the older and nonwhite partisans who are the core of her support. Sanders’s real legacy may be proving to the Democratic Party that the new generation of voters has no affinity for the old Clinton-era politics of moderation. “Sanders is speaking to a rising generation who want both a better and more responsible capitalism and a better and more ethical politics,” Simon Rosenberg said. “Unrigging the system will be a central focus of Democratic politics for years to come—as it should be.”

Sanders is far from ready to admit how narrow his path to victory is, but he is prepared to take credit for shaping the Democratic debate. “When people respond by the millions to your message, then that message is now mainstream,” he said. “That changes political reality. Smart politicians like Hillary Clinton and anybody else have got to move where the action is, and the action is on those issues that I’ve been raising.” ♦

Ryan Lizza, an on-air contributor for CNN, was The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent from 2007-2017.